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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/for-more-sustainable-affordable-housing-just-add-mushrooms/>
"David Benjamin’s recipe for construction materials sounds like witchcraft: Mix
corn stalks with hemp and mushroom roots, pour the mixture into molds that
resemble the shapes you need, and voilà, the building material will grow all by
itself. In five days!
Simply put, this is the process of mycotecture, architecture with mushrooms.
Fungi and facades are unlikely friends architects usually prefer not to mention
in the same breath. But Benjamin named his New York architecture firm The
Living because he wants exactly that: to bring architecture alive, literally.
“Biological systems are adaptable; they live, breathe and regenerate
themselves,” he says in his office in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. “Imagine
buildings had these traits! This would change our way of life radically.”
Maybe even more importantly, organic materials do not create trash. “Forty
percent of the trash in our landfills is from construction,” notes Benjamin,
who is also director at Autodesk Research and an architecture professor at
Columbia. “We architects like to build for eternity, with steel and cement, but
not all buildings need to last forever, and when we look at the landfills, we
realize: Maybe we better look for materials which don’t sit in landfills for
centuries and millennia.”
He integrates living organisms into his designs to create dynamic buildings
that interact with their environment and leave a small CO2 footprint. His first
foray into fungitecture together with the New York company Ecovative consisted
of three towers, 13 meters high, that served as an event space at MOMA in 2014
and were entirely built from mycelium and hemp bricks. After three months, the
towers were deconstructed and composted. In 2021, Benjamin built an arc for the
Centre Pompidou in Paris for which he let mushrooms grow on hemp until the
structure naturally fused together. Fuzzy cardboard-like clumps the size of
ping-pong balls grown from hemp-fungi in his office are the last reminder of
the perishable structure.
Admittedly, these projects served primarily to show the world that building
with fungi was doable — the prototypes weren’t exactly move-in ready. This
year, however, Benjamin will test the concept for the first time on a large
scale and build a 300-unit affordable housing complex in Oakland, California.
In partnership with Autodesk, Ecovative, the prefab company Factory OS, and the
composite façade specialists at Kreysler and Associates, he wants to tackle one
of the most urgent problems in the US: the housing crisis."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
